Traitor

Jonas Kyratzes has brought us many enjoyable, thoughtful games in bizarre, surreal settings. Well, now he's developed a top-down space shooter, Traitor. Don't get scared, he's still able to cast his powers of storytelling, it's just in a different yummy, gooey, science fiction package. Take on missions to earn credits for upgrades as well as the trust of the rebels. Your ultimate goal: to take down the Augustan Hegemony. Viva la People's Council!

Uh, what monitor resolution does Jonas Kyratzes expect us to have? It's really frustrating to not be able to fit the whole game on my screen, and I'm using 1024x768. Don't most people who don't have fancypants monitors use that?

gatekeeper.aidan, try clicking outside the game window and hitting Control-minus (or Command-minus if on a Mac). That'll work in Chrome, though I'm not sure if the other browsers resize Flash windows yet. (Control-plus or Command-plus to enlarge the page again if you go shrink too far.)

I'll be honest, when I started this, I wasn't too impressed. I soldiered through the intro though, and now I won't stop playing it.

I'm gonna put a spoiler tag in before I give my impression of the upgrades, just to be safe:

One comment though, about the upgrades... it doesn't seem like the upgrades give you as much... well upgraded capabilities as I was expecting.

I was expecting to be able to upgrade my gun and go back to levels that I'd gotten killed on the first few times around, but (specifically) the gun speed and power upgrades don't seem to have much effect - at least the upgrades I've purchased thus far.

I was a little disappointed with the scanner, as it's required to get into a couple of areas, but if you rush to get the scanner, you can't do much in those areas until you've built up your reputation anyway.

I really enjoyed this game. Although I do need to disagree with the reviewer's analysis of the game being "huge." Although there was a lot to discover and do, but I would not consider it "huge."
Had one issue where the game froze when I had the 2 allies attacking with me. Not sure what may have caused the freeze, but one of them had been destroyed and the other was all the way on the right side of the screen, halfway off-screen.

My strategy:

Upgrade your weapons to the max before anything. Second, get the regeneration upgrades and finally get the upgrades to shields and hull. Get all the upgrades you can before you get the scanner to enter the two other areas. With high weapon power, you can easily collect money by mining. For the final two battles (the only truly challenging ones in the game) I recommend the ally that repairs your ship once; even with full regen, shields, and hull, those guys that shoot the three wobbly balls at you can make short work of you--just DON'T hit them with your ship!

Cornelius Baxter, I'm curious to know what beyond having "a lot to discover and do" would make a game huge for you. Of course, it's by no means a PC/console game, but I thought it had quite a lot for a flash game. I'm not trying to argue my words, just better understand how others interpret them so I can make my articles more meaningful.

How do you use allies? I played the entire game without knowing I could...

I thought it was actually very interesting that you start out with weak weapons and even the upgrades you get don't feel all that useful for a while. Things are just peculiarly set up so that upgrades only start to really be good in combination (for instance, regen+better armor is immensely better than just one or the other. With it, you can actually employ ramming enemies as a tactic in some cases). It felt like for a long time I had to just coast around and dodge most enemies, then all of a sudden the ship was modified enough to do some real damage; and I think that makes a lot of sense in terms of the story. I mean, a tiny ex-military ship shouldn't be expected to do a lot of damage to the bigger guns until it has been heavily modified.

Also,

If you shoot down the medical ships (I tried shooting down all of them for curiosity after not shooting at them the first time around), you keep all your credits from military time but three habitats in Occator Prime are "wiped out due to disease", including the one where you pay 3000 credits to gain reputation for saving them. I don't remember what the other two did, but they were probably an upgrade and a relatively easy mission.

Anyone else having an issue with sticky keys? I find that the key detect is wonky, so my ship is hard to control. Most maddening - sometimes when I tap X to enter a planet, the game thinks I'm still holding it down and autobuys the sale item.

Jonas told me your issue was fixed in the latest update, so if you're still seeing the issue try emptying your browser cache first, then reload the game page. That will ensure you are getting the latest version.

Allies? Where?? Am I allowed to feel slightly leet for having beaten the game without even knowing I had that option?

I actually liked the choice to make the main weapon underpowered for most of the game. It meant I had to fly evasively, pick my targets, and occasionally just fly straight into a bad guy blasting away, praying they'd explode at the last second. It also made the weapon upgrades extremely satisfying when I could finally afford them!

I'm a sucker for good flavor text, and this game had a ton of it. It also seemed like nice, subtle propaganda. The kind of thing that might fleetingly come to mind next time you see some talking head on TV explaining why [unnamed nation] was obligated to block food aid or medical supplies to [much smaller nation] in order to make a political point...

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